Colors of Happiness (Barwy szczęścia) is a long-running Polish drama. It’s been airing consistently since 2007, and is now in its 10th season; there are more than 1,500 half-hour episodes already. The show, considered a soap opera, is regularly ranked one of the most popular in Poland, second only to L for Love (M jak Milość).

By description, the show sounds a lot like Desperate Housewives: it takes place on one street in Warsaw, and most of the characters either live there or are related to those who do. Characters come and go as they move to and away from the estate. The first few seasons of the show told the story of couple Julia and Paweł Zwoleńscy and their complicated, entangled network of families and friends. Together on and off since high school, in the beginning of the series the couple is finally beginning to settle down; they have several kids over the course of the series. There is a very large number of other characters, many of whom have been on the show all the way since the beginning.

Two of the longest-running stars of the show are Katarzyna Zielińska, who played a character named Marta Walawska from 2007 to 2017, and Katarzyna Glinka, who has been playing Katarzyna Górka since 2007. Zielińska is an actor and singer who has participated in a number of televised singing and dance competitions, in addition to her film and TV work. Glinka is a theater and film actress who has participated in the Polish Dancing with the Stars and also acted in For Better or For Worse for several years before Colors premiered.

The show has won a number of Telekamera awards (though it hasn’t in about five years) and has very mixed audience reviews, though it continues to attract large numbers of viewers.

Julie is currently studying Russian as a Second Language in Irkutsk (and before that, Bishkek) with SRAS's Home and Abroad Scholarship program, with the goal of someday having some sort of Russia/Eurasia-related career. She recently got her master’s degree from the University of Glasgow and the University of Tartu, where she studied women’s dissent in Soviet Russia. She also has a bachelor’s degree in literature from Yale. Some of her favorite Russian authors are Sorokin, Shishkin, Il’f and Petrov, and Akhmatova. In her spare time Julie cautiously practices martial arts, reads feminist websites, and taste-tests instant coffee for her blog.

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PopKult is devoted to the popular, contemporary cultures of Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Central Asia, and other Eurasian countries. We hope that this site will encourage cultural curiosity in our students and provide them with sources of modern language to learn from. Read more about PopKult and SRAS here.